Chapter 4: Changing Your Desires
The Every Day Supernatural
Many religious people try hard to do better. And die trying.
They either wither from the exhaustion of trying to be better, or puff up with pride from thinking they are better.
That’s a very natural way of thinking.
But God is supernatural.
When God changes you, He changes you from the inside out.
Not from your effort.
From His transformation.
Dale Partridge provides a compelling example:
I had spent the past several years trying to “be good” in a for-profit social enterprise I built that raised money for charities. We had over 50 employees and nearly $7 million in annual revenue. “Being good” felt great especially when it paid nearly a quarter-million per year and I was being featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine and enjoying mentions in Forbes, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today.
But inside, I was as broken as you could be. My marriage was failing. My relationships we superficial. My identity was in my money and I was frustrated with why I couldn’t find freedom from the bondage of pornography and other habitual sins.
During that time, I was still reading my Bible. Oddly enough, I kept crossing paths with passages that taught that Christians were set free from the bondage of sin (1 John 3:9; Romans 6:14; Romans 6:18; John 8:32).
But when I looked at my Bible and compared it against my life, the two were wildly different. I had a sense that I wasn’t experiencing the promises of Scripture.
To be clear, I’m not saying that Christians don’t sin. I’m saying that born-again Christians are no longer slaves to sin. That is, they don’t sin habitually or addictively. We know this because 1 John 3:9 says, “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning because he has been born of God.” Unfortunately, this wasn’t true in my life. I was a practicing sinner. That is, and what does practice do? It makes you better at something. I had habitual sin in my life—sin that was growing and sin that I couldn’t conquer on my own.
But after we moved, I met an older gentleman in Oregon who, by God’s grace, invited me to a small local Bible study where at last, the Gospel was preached! It was just me and four other men of similar age. What an amazing result the Good News had produced in me. For the first time in my life, I went home and experienced a deep conviction in my heart. In fact, I remember the fear of the Lord taking over me and how repentance began to pour out of my heart. Something had changed inside. Not only did I openly confess my sin to my wife but my bondage to pornography disappeared. I was made new.
As I said earlier, I’ll say again, the miracle of the Gospel isn’t that it changes what you do—no—the miracle is that it changes what you want to do. (How God Saved, Freed, and Reformed Dale Partridge—A Personal Testimony - Relearn.org)
The Bible calls this being made new — the old is gone:
If anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV).
This is a supernatural rebirth. The old person, bound by the weakness and desires of all human flesh, is replaced by the new person, Spirit-born and alive in new strength and new desires.
As Dale put it so eloquently, the miracle of the Gospel is that it changes what you want to do. Dale provides living proof.
First, he felt conviction and repentance welling up from inside him, pouring out of him. This wasn’t a guilt-induced reluctant change of behavior, but a deep desire for change from within, a deep realization that his life needed to change, and was now changing.
Second, his struggle with pornography disappeared. Prior to his new birth, he had tried to kill this struggle repeatedly, only to fail every time. Only when God made him new did he stop.
He didn’t white-knuckle the struggle until he resisted. His desires changed. He didn’t want pornographer anymore.
Third, he confessed his sin to his wife. This might seem like much at first, but realize the magnitude of this shift: the sins he had always tried to hide he now openly confessed.
He hasn’t been caught. No one forced him to admit anything.
But God changed his heart to such an extent that what had been hidden in darkness he now willingly brought out into the light.
These weren’t natural changes, bright about by fear or guilt or shame or rigorous discipline.
These changes came about supernaturally, as the Spirit of God birthed new spiritual life in Dale when he finally believed the Gospel.
His example is one among millions. The Bible contains a plethora of stories, including Saul, the man who became Paul.
Paul (then Saul) began encountering Christians as their persecutor. He felt lethal force was justified to stop the early church, in effect declaring, I will kill you because you don’t believe what I do.
After God saved him, the old man fell away. God made him new, changing him so completely from the inside that Paul’s entire approach to others inverted. Instead of taking the life of those who disagreed with him, Paul now gladly risked his own life to share Jesus with those who believed differently.
In Paul’s own words:
I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith, so that through my being with you again your boasting in Christ Jesus will abound on account of me. (Philippians 1:20-26 NIV).
Paul went from hating the “other” to giving his life for the good of the “other.” He continually laid his own desires down for the good of others, and delighted to do so.
If you’ve never felt this shift in your life, take your old self to God and ask Him to put it to death. Ask Him to birth in you the new self, the Spirit-born self, the entirely new version of you.
Ask God to change your heart, to change your desires, to love what God loves and hate what God hates.
The God who created your life once can create a new life in you again.